New Arrivals
Beija Flors Velho E Sujo
São Paulo Underground is an electronica-laced tropicalia funhouse, a secret passage between Chicago’s volatile avant garde jazz scene and Brazil’s teeming creative capital. Featuring Chicago maestro Rob Mazurek on cornet, harmonium and various effects, and São Paulo’s Guilherme Granado on keyboards, synths, sampler and vocals, and Mauricio Takara on percussion, cavaquinho and electronics, SPU delivers its fourth revelatory album Beija Flors Velho E Sujo.In its latest incarnation, SPU is a power …
Has anybody seen our freedoms?
Recorded in December 1970. "Peter Walker is an American original, as eclectic and enigmatic as the songs he writes. The legendary seventy-five year old raga/psychedelic/folk acoustic guitarist, who was schooled by masters such as Ravi Shankar, and Ali Akbar Khan, has been described by Larry Coryell as, “One of the most original practitioners of contemporary music” and proclaimed by the Beatles’ press agent Derek Taylor as “Perhaps the greatest guitarist in the world.” His music, celebrated by t…
Almanac
Dragon Turtle Almanac is a heavy trip; a document of transformation, entropy, and causality. Dragon Turtle evokes Morricone landscapes as if painted by Glenn Branca, where dream atmospheres meet brutal realities of nature and relationships. These forces are both beautiful ("Causality", "Belt of Venus") and destructive ("Moon Fallout", "Burn the Leaves"). The textures and layers move with a sense of urgency and purpose ("Hometime", "Hourglass"). The duality of Tom Asselin and Brian Lightbody's mu…
In St Cuthbert's Time
The Sounds of Lindisfarne and the Gospels. To celebrate the exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at Durham Cathedral from July to September 2013, awardÐwinning wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson has researched the sonic environment of the Holy Island as it might have been experienced by St Cuthbert in 700 A.D. 'A 7th Century Soundscape of Lindisfarne. Throughout human history artists have been influenced by their surroundings and the sounds of the landscape they inhabit. When Eadfrith, the B…
Dabke 2020: folk & pop sounds of Syria
Sublime Frequencies is pleased to present the second volume of Northeast Syrian dabke music from legendary vocalist Omar Souleyman and his group. This record was compiled by Mark Gergis to coincide with the Sublime Frequencies UK/European tour in May and June of 2009, featuring live performances by Omar Souleyman himself. Culled from dozens of cassettes recorded in Syria from 1999-2008, the music here is an extension of Omar's Highway to Hassake: Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria (SF 031CD) release, to…
Sacred Islands Of The Mad
"Dark Entries is honored to present the highly limited second cassette by British duo Nagamatzu for the first time ever on vinyl. “Sacred Islands of the Mad” is a collection of eleven tracks recorded between December 1984 and March 1986 in London by Andrew Lagowski (SETI, Legion, Terror Against Terror) on synths, guitar, and drum machines and Stephen Jarvis (Pure Motorised Instinct, Terraform) on synths, bass and programming. Nagamatzu began in 1982 after messing around with old tape machines an…
N 7 (Interviews Special Issue)
Bilingual (English/French) and biannual, Volume - What You See Is What You Hear is the first magazine devoted to sound issues in art, and to the complex relationships between visual and sound forms, both in contemporary art and history. Interviews Special Issue. 'Why a special issue devoted to the interview? This kind of text has been a feature of the magazine since the very first issue, and is intrinsically bound up with words Ð or at least with dialogue, because interviews are not necessarily …
Living on the Invisible Line
Since 1997 Italian brother duo My Cat Is An Alien has been documenting an ever deepening musical dreamscape, their massive body of work representing some of the most emotive and soulful improvised experimentalism in underground music. Recorded in a remote region of the Western Alps, this latest LP navigates especially tranquil territory as it builds blissed-out pastoral mirages, dappled just slightly with glimmers of an outer darkness. Like much of the duo's best work, Living On the Invis…
Tragedy & Geometry
On Tragedy & Geometry, Steve Hauschildt, one-third of Cleveland’s neo-kosmische revivalists Emeralds, crafts an hour’s worth of instrumental synthesizer vignettes. His pieces tend to evoke thoughts of bygone eras of technological pop culture — many of these tracks could be placed seamlessly into Blade Runner, or into some lost Playstation-era (you know, when Final Fantasy VII was cutting edge) videogame. Hauschildt doesn’t craft wholly formed songs so much as he works with detached, technologica…
Sunrise
The music of My Education, a five-piece group from Austin, Texas, tends towards the classical side of the spectrum. If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group däle…
Menses
*Numbered edition of 206 copies pressed on 180 gram Menstrual Blood Red vinyl* Reissue of the private LP edition of 300 copies from 1981; the pyramidal construction of these two 'suites,' with its intentionally brutal and grotesque deformations, elaborates on overflowing and apocalyptical collapse, dragging a completely dissolvent conception of the world and of the para-industrial sound. Bonus tracks: 'Milan Bruits' from the Fix Planet! comp (Ata Tak) and the two tracks first issued in the v…
The Plain Where The Palace Stood
Drag City drops the sixth and latest David Grubbs pop album, The Plain Where the Palace Stood, which finds David once again twining together the diverse strands of his vast interests. Working with Andrea Belfi (drums, electronics) and Stefano Pilia (guitar) - plus Attila Faravelli on electronics - creates a sympathetic groupthink that David expects more and greater from in the years to come. The welcome return of his distinctive overdriven guitar tone is a highlight of the record. And C. S…
Scott 2
2013 repress. "Originally released in 1968, Scott 2 made it all the way to number one on the UK pop charts, perhaps the strangest number one hit in pop history. Continuing with his orchestral obsession, Scott 2 features over-the-top string and horn arrangements, occasionally veering into dangerously schmaltzy territory. This production style is in drastic contrast to the lyrical content, songs of despair, prostitution, homosexuality, and brutal honesty, indicting the same glamorous and gli…
Veterans of disorder
Back in play just to celebrate 14 years, 2 months and 12 days since its original release is Royal Trux's penultimate album, Veterans of Disorder. Coming off the fan-favorite Accelerator LP, it was clearly time to build on expectations, right? Uh... listen, maybe this isn't the band for you. Neil and Jennifer were fans of rock n roll to the finish, sure -- but in that, Royal Trux was a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian enterprise, rebels to the core, and everything they endeavored to was viewed from th…
Evening river
Vinyl edition of this stunningly beautiful album of fragile and haunting Korean folk from Kim Doo Soo that was issued earlier this year on CD by Japan's consistently incredible PSF label. Kim Doo Soo's first major appearance outside of Korea was through the Damon & Naomi curated 'International Sad Hits' compilation featuring 4 tracks from Kim. This was followed with PSF releasing his first new record in 5 year, 2007's superb '10 Days Butterfly'. On 'Evening River', Kim has re-recorded some of hi…
New Egypt
One track, Ten minutes. Latest Latitudes session from Mira Billotte and Doug Shaw’s Psychedelic folk combo.- New Egypt follows White Magic's hugely successful Dark Stars EP (Drag City, 2007).- This track was created specially for the Latitudes series and recorded during White Magic's 2007 European tour.- As usual this Latitudes release is in super fancy art cardstock packaging with gold foil blocking, limited to 1000 only!When i saw White Magic play for the first time I walked away charmed and e…
The Face of the Earth
The second beautiful album by the duo of Jessika Kenney -- a vocalist known for her haunting timbral sense, as well as her profound interpretation of Persian vocal traditions -- and Eyvind Kang -- a violist for whom the act of music and learning is a spiritual discipline. All tracks were composed by Kenney (voice, percussion, electronics) and Kang (viola, setar, electronics). "The Central Javanese Wangsalan is a kind of riddle (two lines, twelve syllables each, divided 4 and 8 ), sung by the…
Body waves
On 22 February 2011, an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter Scale hit Christchurch, which combined with a series of massive aftershocks destroyed huge swathes of the New Zealand city. At its epicentre in the port of Lyttelton, sound artist Jo Burzynska (Stanier Black-Five) grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside. This unique recording of …
Antropofagia
An outstanding recording, and an unjustly neglected contribution to prepared piano performance by Area member Patrizio Fariselli issued on Cramps in 1977 (in the legendary "DIVerso" series), a record with energy that's somewhere between John Cage and Cecil Taylor! At times, Patrizio Fariselli plays with a great sensitivity to silence – letting it emerge with as much force as his well-placed work on the keys of the piano. But at other times, he comes off with a full, frenzied sound that's really …
Sounding the Body Electric
The connections between the visual arts and experimental music were closer in the 1960s and 1970s than perhaps any time before or since. Sound and image combined in artists films, \'happenings\' and sounding installations. Experimental Forms of notation were also created to stimulate uninhibited musical expression. Eastern European artists and composers were at the forefront of these new experiments with sound and yet their achievements have never been recorded until now. Sounding the Body…